From 'out there' to indoor life

Twin brothers Frank, left, and Anthony Nowotnik in the kitchen of the Uptown residential facility where they now live. (Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune)

After 30 years of living like ghosts on the streets, sleeping under a bridge and drifting through warming centers, Frank and Anthony Nowotnik are learning to live inside.

There are advantages, including heat and hot water, that come with the move indoors.

But nearly every day, the 43-year-old twin brothers feel the pull of their old life under the bridge. The shopping cart that held their belongings. The bottle of vodka that they tucked under their heads at night. The dull, rhythmic thump of the cars passing — bump, bump — on the expressway overhead.

"I miss it. I actually do miss it," says Anthony, of the years the brothers spent living under the highway. He folds his rough hands and looks down.

"The freedom," adds Frank.

They had lived on the streets since they were 13, two men amid the roughly 1,700 homeless people who shun the city's shelters and instead survive on the margins — parks and underpasses, abandoned cars and cardboard boxes — places the twins call "out there."

Now the brothers have a home at Pathways Safe Haven, a place of last resort for the most desperate homeless. But the transition inside hasn't been easy.

Thrown out of two housing programs in the last year for excessive drinking, the brothers are trying to face down their demons and scrambling once again to gain a foothold inside. The stakes are never far from theirminds: At least 50 homeless men and women died in Chicago last year, most of them while living on the street. If not for a place to stay, Anthony says, "I probably would have been dead too."

Now, they pay their rent, have bank accounts and stop at the dry cleaners to have their shirts pressed.

But every night, they open their windows and spread their blankets on the floor. They can't get used to the warmth of the indoors. And it's difficult to sleep in a bed when, as Anthony explains, "I'm so used to sleeping on the ground."

For the last year, that is how the twins have lived — reconciling inside and out — caught between two worlds.

They know they can live on the streets. Now, they wonder, can they navigate a world on the inside?

Battling booze

Born on the South Side, the brothers grew up in a family that, they say, had been blown apart by heroin. They escaped violence at home by sleeping outside and eventually left home altogether. They stole food to survive, dropped out of school and never learned to write.

After serving time in prison for aggravated battery in the 1990s, they returned to the streets, where, for years, they skimmed along, anesthetized on cheap vodka and keeping a wary eye out for the thugs who beat the homeless for fun. Life might have gone on like that. But in July 2010, Anthony was run over by an SUV while sleeping on a sidewalk.

Recovering from head injuries in a nursing home, he was recruited by a fledgling program that sought the most vulnerable homeless and attempted to move them inside. When the Tribune first wrote about the brothers in December 2010, Anthony had been offered a room at the Lake View YMCA but refused to move inside without Frank.

For several bitterly cold weeks, the brothers lived under a bridge at California Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway, counting the days until Frank's room was scheduled to become available and both could move inside, together.

But that move was fraught with challenges. They landed rooms at the Lake View YMCA in January but were kicked out in April for getting drunk and acting rowdy. By October, they had been ejected from a second program by social workers who quickly recognized that the brothers — soaking themselves with vodka — desperately needed more help.

And so, the pair crossed the threshold of Pathways, a program that is unusual in that it doesn't require residents to stop drinking or using drugs in order to live there. The approach is called "housing first," and it is critical, social workers say, when it comes to people like the twins who are in the grips of long-standing addiction and who, without such a program, would likely die on the streets.

Now, instead of bedding down under the bridge, the brothers push through the glass doors of a red brick building in the city's Uptown neighborhood. They pass beneath glass chandeliers and elegant green archways and ride a creaky elevator to the fifth floor. There, they live on a hallway painted lavender and mix among two dozen formerly homeless men and women, all dealing with varying levels of addiction and mental illness.

There is the 47-year-old cocaine addict who is beloved among the residents for her cooking, especially her barbecue ribs, which she always shares and often delivers to the homeless still on the street. And the 52-year-old alcoholic and resident theologian, who leads Bible study on Sundays. Both are bright spots on a floor where alcoholics bob and sway in the line for dinner and glazed-eyed junkies float down the hall on their way to the next fix.